'The Shadow King' Is A Gorgeous Meditation On Memory, War And Violence
Maaza Mengiste's new novel is set just before the second Italo-Ethiopian War, and follows a woman who becomes a guard to a "shadow king," a man impersonating exiled Ethiopian ruler Haile Selassie.
Maaza Mengiste's opens with a woman, Hirut, sitting on the floor of a train station in the Ethiopian city of Addis Ababa, holding an old metal box. She's traveled here, the reader is told, "to rid herself of the horror that staggers back unbidden. She has come to give up the ghosts and drive them away." She's awaiting the box's owner, an Italian photographer she hasn't seen in decades. "It has taken so long to get here," Mengiste writes. "It has taken
